Improbable Research

Physicists enjoy it when someone flatly utters a piece of stunning nonsense — nonsense based on assumptions that are known to be wrong. Physicists see this as an invitation to use their most famous dismissive phrase: “It’s not even wrong.”

Radio personality Michael Medved, in a column about deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) published May 14, 2008, gleefully illustrates the concept of “not even wrong”:

In today’s ruthlessly competitive international economy, the United States may benefit from a potent but unheralded advantage: the aggressive edge sustained by the inherited power of American DNA….

The insight carries crucial political implications. Senators Obama, Clinton and other leaders who seek to enlarge the scope of government face more formidable obstacles than they realize. Their desire to impose a European-style welfare state and a command-and-control economy not only contradicts our proudest political and economic traditions, but the new revelations about American DNA suggest that such ill-starred schemes may go against our very nature.

(Thanks to investigator Paula Trowbridge for bringing this to our attention.)

Newspaper editors, some of them, are eternally fascinated by intestines, and sometimes let this creep into their work. Today’s example, from the Boston Globe, is the headline in a report about a baseball player named Bartolo Colon, who might replace an injured player on the local team. The headline: “Colon may fill the void Tuesday“.

People say a “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”, but try masturbating a two metre tall, 120 kilogram male ostrich with powerful legs and toenails and you’ve got a challenge on your hands.

Dr Irek Malecki, co-supervisor of the project, said the technique, which involved using a dummy female for collecting ostrich ejaculates, evolved out of animal behaviour observations, where captive reared birds become imprinted and perceived humans as “sexy” and worthy of their sexual display.

Researchers in the School of Animal Biology at The University of Western Australia (UWA) have achieved a world-first by developing animal and human-friendly methods for semen collection and artificial insemination in ostriches. [The photo shows Dr  Malecki "collecting semen from
a male emu, who is much gentler than a male ostrich, using an artificial cloaca."]

So says a May 15, 2008 Science Alert report.

The research builds, directly or indirectly on the Ig Nobel Prize winning study “Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain.” Charles Paxton, co-author of that study, will discuss it and its implications as part of the Ig Nobel Cabaret at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Friday night, June 7.

(Thanks to investigator Nicole Bordes for bringing this to our attention.)

A pound of lead feels heavier than a pound of feathers - a thing long suspected, but not carefully tested until recently, when Jeffrey B Wagman, Corinne Zimmerman and Christopher Sorric ran an experiment involving lead, feathers, plastic bags, cardboard boxes, a chair, blackened goggles, and 23 volunteers from the city of Normal, Illinois.

The scientists are based at Illinois State University, which is located in that unassumingly named metropolis. In a study published in the journal Perception, they explain why they took the trouble: “‘Which weighs more - a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?’

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

Sanford (”Spamford”) Wallace, the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize Winner in the field of communications (and also disco host), lost a court case yesterday, May 14, 2008. The Associated Press reports:

MySpace wins $230 million anti-spam judgment

By ANICK JESDANUN

NEW YORK (AP) — A notorious “Spam King” and his partner now owe MySpace about $230 million in damages after a federal judge awarded the popular online hangout what is believed to be the largest anti-spam judgment ever….

U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins in Los Angeles ruled in MySpace’s favor Monday after Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines failed to show up for a court hearing.

Wallace earned the monikers “Spam King” and “Spamford” as head of a company that sent as many as 30 million junk e-mails a day in the 1990s. He left that company, Cyber Promotions, following lawsuits from leading Internet service providers such as Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, only to re-emerge in a spyware case that led to a $4 million federal judgment against him in 2006.

(Thanks to David Brooks for bringing Wallace’s disco career to our attention.)

It might be the best-kept secret in the state. And you can check it out at the public library; that is, the public libraries in Coventry, Lincoln and Scituate –– just in time for fishing season.

Tucked in among the stacks of books are cabinets stuffed with fishing equipment: rods, reels, tackle boxes, hooks, lures, sinkers and floats. If you fancy taking a youngster or two out for a leisurely day of fishing without an outlay of money to get started, here’s your chance.

All you need is a library card.

Three branches in the Cooperating Libraries Automated Network, CLAN, allow patrons to borrow a full complement of fishing equipment.

So says a May 13, 2008 Providence Journal report.

(Thanks to LISNews for bringing this to our attention.)

Karen McFarlane Holman has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Thomas McFarlane, who nominated her, says:

My sister, Karen, has had luxuriant flowing hair ever since we were children. The photo shows it swinging around during a performance with her band, The Funhouse Strippers. She is also a chemistry professor using infrared spectroelectochemistry and X-ray absorption spectroscopy to investigate fundamental chemistry related to the mechanisms of action of ruthenium anti-cancer drugs.

Karen McFarlane Holman, Ph.D., LFHCfS
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Willamette University
Salem, Oregon, USA

Tim Idzenga came up with the idea of using the sound produced by the urinary flow in the urethra as a measure of the urethral resistance. He performed the measurement by placing a microphone against the perineum, between the scrotum and anus. The frequency spectrum of the sound was found to correlate with the narrowing of the urethra. The degree of narrowing can therefore be determined from the recorded urinary sound.

A patent for this invention is being applied for in cooperation with the company IQ+ Medical BV.

So reports Science Daily on April 24, 2008. A 2005 study by Idzenga and colleagues tells of an early version of the work.

(Thanks to investigator Jilly Dybka for bringing this to our attention.)

“The Misremembrance of Wines Past: Verbal and Perceptual Expertise Differentially Mediate Verbal Overshadowing of Taste Memory,” Joseph M. Melcher and Jonathan W. Schooler, Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 35, no. 2, April 1996, pp. 231-45 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.1996.0013). The authors, who are at the University of Pittsburgh, report that:

When participants generate a detailed, memory-based description of complex nonverbal stimuli (e.g., faces) their recognition performance can be worse than nondescribing controls…. The present study explored this hypothesis by examining the impact of verbalization on the wine recognition of individuals of three categories of wine tasting expertise: Non-wine drinkers, untrained wine drinkers, and trained wine experts. Participants tasted a red wine, engaged in either verbalization or an unrelated verbal activity, and then attempted to identify the target wine from among three foils. As predicted, only the untrained wine drinkers showed impaired wine recognition following verbalization. The results are explained in terms of the differential development of perceptual and verbal skills in the course of becoming an expert.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Soft Is Hard (Further evidence why the “soft” sciences are the hardest to do well),” Published in AIR 11:1)

With some modern exceptions (see “How to Write 85,000 Books,” elsewhere in this issue of the Annals of Improbable Research) every book has a human author.1 For whatever reasons, some of those books are published anonymously. The late nineteenth century saw a massive effort to identify and list all the anonymous books and other literature published in at least one language.

The result:

A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain, Including the Work of Foreigners Written in, or Translated into the English Language, Samuel Halkett and John Laing, 1888, W. Paterson publishers, Edinburgh.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Anonymity, in Bulk,” by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, published in AIR 14:2)

Not having purchased a full subscription to New England Journal of Medicine I haven’t access to the article “Amebiasis from the ‘Miraculous Water of Tlacote” [which you mentioned]. Nonetheless I’ve taken tlacote tablets for three years and have suffered no ill effects. In fact I’ve found it most helpful. Millions of people have availed themselves of the water, either in liquid or homeopathic form. Where is the evidence of a health issue precipitated by ingesting this water? I submit the case of Amebiasis cited above was from another water source. Thus I find the Improbable Research article [on the web site, written in 2001] fits well under the heading of “hot air.” A New Light is entering the World. Find out more at:http://www.share-international.org.

David E. Mynott II
Boston, MA

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Air Vents,” published in AIR 11:1)

Short book titles that start with “The End of …” began to appear long ago. George Waring’s The End of Time, published in 1790, set a good, clean standard for title pithiness. In 1795, Thomas Spence followed suit with The End of Oppression. The trend was set.

Here are some, but by no means all, of the other non-fiction Ends to which authors and publishers have gone. (Some added a colon and subtitles to their basic four or five words, but only purists need hold that against them.) Together they almost tell a story:

The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben; The End of Science, by John Horgan; The End of Medicine, by Andy Kessler; The End of Medicine, by Rick Carlson; The End of Medicine, by Kaare Bursell; The End of History, by Francis Fukuyama; The End of History, by Philip N Moore; The End of Food, by Thomas F Pawlick; The End of Oil, by Paul Roberts…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

In reference to your Bozo item:

A few years ago at the Australian National University in Canberra, the School of Biological Sciences was created, or reorganised (or something!). Several departments were brought together and then split up in a slightly different way. When it came to naming each new Division, there emerged 1) Botany & Zoology, 2) Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and 3) Psychology. Yep — BoZo, BaMBi and Psycho. To be fair, I don’t think Psychology was ever widely referred to as Psycho, but BoZo and BaMBi are still around and still go by those names).

Yet more recently they have again reorganised (who would have guessed?) and now in the College of Science is School of BoZo, School of BaMBi and School of Psychology. Apparently School of BoZo is not a clown school. Here is a clown school: http://www.artmedia.com.au/Clown.htm

So writes investigator Wendy Cooper (graduate of BaMBi, married to staff member of BoZo)

Prof. Awais Rashid of the Computing Department at Lancaster University is looking for a Ph.D. student to help him in “rethinking the
 classical notions of abstraction in software engineering.”

He’s offering a position called “PhD Studentship - Divinity and Abstraction: A Theory of Software Engineering 
for Systems-of-Systems .” Closing date for applications: 15 May 2008. The project has five key phases. The first four are:

1. Study of debates on the nature of the holy trinity and the divinity of Jesus (e.g., between early church fathers, such as Irenaeus and Tertullian, and the authors of texts, such as those discovered at Nag Hammadi, that did not form part of the Nicene Creed) as well as the treatises on transubstantiation during the Reformation (e.g., the writings of John Wyclif) to understand how monotheistic theology has treated varying natures of divinity.

2. Contrasting the study in (1) with eastern religious philosophies, such as Hinduism, which are inherently founded on the multi-faceted nature of divinity.

3. Analysing the factors that bind the followers of a religion in a loosely coupled fashion across geographical and cultural boundaries and how the interpretations of divinity differ across these boundaries in both types of theologies.

4. Formulating a theory of abstraction for systems-of-systems by reconciling results of (1)-(3) with the existing classical technical notions of abstraction for software systems, especially roles, views and aspects all of which facilitate multi-faceted abstraction that goes beyond traditional module boundaries.

(Thanks to investigator Rémi Bastide for bringing this to our attention.)

Perverse incentives in drug development, research, marketing and clinical usage can be illustrated by considering the example of the so- called ‘atypical’ neuroleptics which have grown to become a standard – indeed expanding - part of psychiatric practice despite their probable inferiority to older sedative agents. There is now ample evidence to suggest that neuroleptics (aka. anti-psychotics and major tranquillizers) are dangerous drugs, and patients’ exposure to them should be minimized wherever possible.

so says the study “If ‘atypical’ neuroleptics did not exist, it wouldn’t be necessary to invent them: perverse incentives in drug development, research, marketing and clinical practice,” Bruce G. Charlton, Medical Hypotheses, vol. 6, 2005, pp. 1005-9. The author is at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.